Great post. Words of wisdom. Thank you.

I suck at poker!!

awesome!

Brad Goodman: Troy. This circle is you.
Troy McClure: My god! It's like you've known me all your life!

Every thought process you mentioned rings eerily true - it's like you've opened my brain and read the contents. Also I've an engineering degree and all of the talk about never having to try and just coasting through is soo true - I've always got by on less work that I should and been unduly rewarded.

Here's to putting in the hard work into poker - rather than just time.

Thanks for the motivation - definitely my fav post on 2+2 so far!

cool.

great thread!

however, i find it very difficult to work on my game. just because i cannot find major leaks anymore. of course, i play a hand wrongly here and there and find it and try to minimize this.
but general leaks, or general spots where i could improve, i find very very difficult to find. or i can find possible spots, but i am just unable to find out which ever would be the better or the optimal play. i usually ask my coach then, i post the thing here etc. and i will be getting different answers, even from people that are well known and by far better than i am. so what shall i do with those contradicious statements? i can find out by playing certain patterns and take notes and do statistics. then i come to the next problem. easiest would be to use old data and try to get those situations out of PT3 i am using. but generally they are so complicated that i do not succeed in filtering them out and putting the data together for analytics. so i need to play and note it down. this means, i need a whole lotta games to do this. in addition it is usually villain dependent and i need to take care of this.

i have a job and family and can play only about 7 games per day in average. now it will take me about a month to have a vague indication about the pattern i am analyzing, and it will take me at least half a year to have accurate data. in addition i need to analyze my games as a whole etc. etc.

so i am ending up being in the horns of a dilemma. working on my game, finding leaks, analyzing against playing. this all ends up in a sort of impatience and very often also in loosing confidence in my game, like right now where i am constantly going down in ROI towards break even play. this in conjunction with seeing villains playing worse than i do and in conjunction with not finding major leaks. all in all this makes me furious and think all day long even away from computer about what i should do. thinking poker all the time but having the feeling not coming forward to better play and not find major leaks. may be i just should play and play and it is really mostly variance at the moment? but does it makes sense to play ~3-6months to then find out that it was not variance. but what is the alternative if i cannot find really major leaks as described above?

i dont know if there are people out there experiencing the same?
what i am missing somehow in these times is - i guess - a chat partner to discuss things in AIM or so...this might help on focusing on the right things?

any other ideas?

First of all I want to thank you for a great post!

Also:

I'm really interested in knowing more about how you are working on this. What approach did your trainer take? Do you have exercises?

This.

You are a winning player? That means finding 'major' leaks will be harder to find, simply because they don't exist as much.

Small leaks will sink a winning players boat. Don't dismiss the small ones just because they are small. I can't emphasis how much this game compounds on itself.

Feels like I learned something. Nice post.

Really good post. Really really good. It's so hard to find that inner mental strength, focus, and discipline sometimes but its imperative to success in poker.

awesome, thanks

TYVM great post.

Thanks this was an awesome post! This really woke me up.

Good thing this was bumped, i missed it because i was away over the holidays.

You nailed everything i think i have to learn to do in poker but can't. I'm definitly one of those people that always got through school and university rather easy, with good results. Still i'm just starting to manage to be a decent winning player at lower stakes.

I always knew it wasn't because i was outsmarted by the players there, and it wasn't my unwillingness to learn either. Most of the time i know exactly what the right thing to do is. And than i still go on and do the dumb thing, or spew away a few buyins because i lose an unlikely hand and tilt.

Working to take my ego out of it is the one thing that would help me improve my game the most, everything else afterwards would almost be smooth sailing.

Hope a lot of people read this and understand what it actually means for them, it definitly refocused me on what i want/need to work on.

Amazing post.. I dont think I've ever read a post and felt lke it was really speaking to me as much as this one did.. Really nice job. thanks a lot..

Good post. I understand where you are coming from,as i used to have not really BIG tilt issues like spew away bankroll,but still big tilt issues that manifested ugly in real life after:being depressed after losing one day(could've won past 6 days 5xtimes i lost would still tilt),breaking stuff out of anger etc. And i didn't tilt only because money,also because i always was very competitive when it came to games,and just hate losing. Accepting losing in poker was hard to do,especially because there were money involved,but w/o accepting it you can't progress.

good post

i thank god that i found this post.

ofc, Thank you aLot!

after buying and reading the poker mindset, i been working on my mental game. this post didn't mean much to me back when i first read it, but that was when my mental game was bad. i do suck at poker and i come to accept it. i love this post and this post just makes me realize that i have a lot more to work at. thank you for this great read sir.

I actually wrote something very similar to this about a year and a half ago (You can see it here: http://www.ninjahpoker.com/mirror.html). I wrote it all mostly to help myself put in in perspective. Sad to say, it really didn't take. I still have the same problem and even though I can talk about it, doing it is so hard. Forget poker, I will suck at life if I don't get over it. Guess that holds true to your 1% idea. On the plus side I'm still 22 and as I get older and accept more and more that I suck, it does seem to get easier to follow this.

LOL "accept more and more that I suck" - Seems like the exact opposite of what you want to be shooting for

great post

I skimmed enough of that to realize you're an epic douche. Like of gargantuan proportions.

I was a little put off by you posting your link in this thread in the first place, and then even more put off by the red-on-black coloration of your website, which is beyond ******ed. But you definitely sealed a level of douche that most people are incapable of attaining while you wrote your post about your $67 bankroll.

Enlightening

lol...

this guy's blog is straight up comedy gold

"I’ll be frank, I should pwn life. Period. My IQ is higher than 99.7% of the rest of the world. I’m stronger and faster than most people I know (although I am horribly uncoordinated). As I’ve found out here in China, give me one night with almost any girl and she’ll probably be in love with me in the morning (not to say that by one night I mean sleep with her, although that’s usually what happens). I have an amazing ability to blend in and work with almost any group. I… am stroking my ego way too much. The point I’m making I have the potential to do basically ANYTHING I want with my life. In fact, I have made much more of my life than most of the 20 year-olds I have met.